How about a little WordPress nerd talk for today?
Over the past few years, I’ve designed dozens of blogs and websites using WordPress as a content management system. For the first few years, I tested out a variety of themes, including both free ones and premium ones. However, I’ve landed on the Genesis framework and there’s no going back. I love it.
To get the hang of it, I used it for my own site before I started using it on others’. It was so easy to learn and it my primary foundation for building a site. It allows me plenty of creative and functionality freedom without having to reinvent the (code) wheel and do everything from scratch.
Here are a few other reasons I love Genesis:
Price: Since I design websites for other people, I have to think about licenses and such. The Genesis Framework allows for an unlimited number of uses on websites – so you just buy it once and can use it as much as you want on client sites. I paid $59.95 for the framework and can use it forever. This was a selling point to me, since I was also looking at Thesis, which costs $40 per client site on top of the $197 for Thesis Professional. Let’s say I do 24 WordPress sites a year for clients – with Genesis it’d cost $59.95, with Thesis it’d cost $1,157.
Support: There are StudioPress support forums, tutorials, resource pages, and dozens of websites dedicated to learning and customizing Genesis. It’s fantastic. Plus, there are tons of plugins for Genesis created and supported by StudioPress itself – much more reliable and secure than third-party plugins.
Flexibility: If you know code, you can do so much with Genesis. It’s fantastic. I find the ability to edit the functions.php and css files incredibly easy-to-use and powerful. I’ve used themes with a less hands-on admin panel, and I far prefer Genesis. (Funnily, I wonder if it’s because I taught myself to code on the Blogger platform, which allows access to the CSS/HTML template.)
Child Themes: This is why I often the recommend Genesis to friends or folks who want a great site but can’t afford a custom professional design. There are dozens of great turn-key designs offered by StudioPress to be used with the Genesis Framework. I develop a theme for each client since I’m generally a control freak, but there are countless options for churches, bloggers, businesses – you can search by category which helpful.
Unlimited everything: Some plugins and premium themes limit how many upgrades you get or how much support you get – with Genesis you get unlimited websites (which I talked about earlier), unlimited upgrades, and unlimited support.
Easy installation: Another reason I tend to recommend Genesis to newbies – it’s not 100% fool-proof for the code-impaired, but it’s pretty darn easy to just upload a zip file of the framework and a theme via the WordPress admin panel. No FTP access needed! Hurrah!
There’s so much more I love about Genesis, including the SEO options, the wide use of it (which makes me feel confident), the solid coding, the mobile responsiveness, its security, and the beauty of the child theme designs.
If you want to know about Genesis, I found this post helpful when I was deciding:
/end nerd talk.
SUPER interesting and useful. I have loved the Thesis theme for years, until they rolled out 2.0 and I felt completely lost. I don’t want to stick with a theme that I can’t keep updated for too long, but there are no other WP themes I’ve ever found that I love as much. I want something that is customizable, but easy to use (for me and my clients), and am super excited to check this out :) Thanks for all the info!
Thanks for the info. I am trying to decide which theme I want to go with and it has helped looking at yours and reading your post. Thanks!
Excellent comparison and great impressions on who Genesis serves you as a site developer. And I tackled your homework: I followed your suggested linked posts about Thesis vs. Genesis and read through them for a better understanding of their differences (and what I’d be facing when I get Genesis). I think the one thing I’ve seen is that there’s a substantial difference between purchasing a fancy theme (as from a Theme Forest) versus purchasing a solid framework.
Thanks, Ashley!